(1949).

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most extensive and widely ratified international human rights treaty. This Commentary offers a comprehensive analysis of each of the substantive provisions in the Convention and its Optional Protocols on Children and Armed Conflict, and the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Pornography. It provides a detailed insight into the drafting history of these instruments, the scope and nature of the rights accorded to children, and the obligations imposed on states to secure the implementation of these rights. In doing so, it draws on the work of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, international, regional, and domestic courts, academic and interdisciplinary scholarly analyses. It is of relevance to anyone working on matters affecting children including government officials, policy makers, judicial officers, lawyers, educators, social workers, health professionals, academics, aid and humanitarian workers, and members of civil society.

This title was first published in 2000: A discussion on the right of a child to a clean environment. It links two important contemporary issues: human rights and the environment. The volume consists of the extended versions of some of the papers which were presented at a workshop on "The Right of a Child to a Clean Environment", held at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, in 1997, and there are also some additional contributions. The workshop participants included Michael Anderson and Sylvia Bluck, Harry Post, Holly Cullen and Olufemi Elias. The additional contributors include Veronic Wright, Maria G. Doglioli and Soledad Aguilar. There are essays on general issues, selected case studies and annexes.

This volume analyzes the effectiveness of the judicial protection of children's rights within the Council of Europe. The extent to which common standards have been developed by the courts in implementing children's rights is examined both from the perspective of the European Court of Human Rights and the judgments of the highest national courts within the member states of the Council of Europe. Further analysis is made of the Council of Europe's Social Charter and the reports of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.--Publisher's description

This challenging volume gathers a selection of the mass of material available from the major human rights instruments, from first drafts, legislative histories, and contemporary commentaries, from more recent scholarship as well as from the General Comments and Concluding Observations and Recommendations of the various treaty monitoring bodies relating to the topic of the unborn child. Contemporary reinterpretations of these documents are held up to the searchlight of historical context, including a reminder of the original purpose and meaning and the philosophical foundation of modern international human rights law.

The child asylum seeker poses unique challenges for reception and refugee status determination systems, not least because the child is entitled to have his or her rights as a child respected as a matter of international and regional human rights law. In the last decade the European Union has increasingly engaged with children’s rights, with the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty in December 2009, and a new Article 3(3) of the Treaty on European Union that commits the Union to promoting the ‘protection of the rights of the child.’ This book addresses the question of whether the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) complies with the rights of the child. It contrasts the normative standards of international child rights law with the treatment of child asylum seekers and refugees in the CEAS. Ciara Smyth identifies the attributes of the rights of the child that are most relevant to the asylum context and systematically examines whether and to what extent those attributes are reflected in the CEAS legislation. The book goes on to assess whether the CEAS instruments direct Member States to comply with the rights of the child, offering a comprehensive examination of the place of the child within European asylum law and policy. The book will be of great use and interest to scholars and students of international law, immigration and children’s rights studies.

This book is the first to comprehensively develop the concept of childism to understand, study, and analyze age-based discrimination against children. It presents a critical theory to help comprehend intersecting prejudice against children and to examine the weak implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and in what ways violations against children can be analyzed through the intersections of racist, sexist, and ableist discrimination. The book further offers scholars a new perspective when studying structural forms of discrimination and oppression against children and provides professionals with a new vocabulary on prejudice targeting children when assessing theory, policy, and praxis on ‘child-friendly’ and ‘child-centered’ initiatives that overlook the need to protect children against discrimination. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of human rights, child and youth studies, education, prejudice studies, the United Nations and child law, and more broadly to sociology, social policy, psychology, and social work. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The book is a comprehensive compendium on child rights in India from a child development perspective. It discusses the challenges that Indian children face for survival, development and education, especially if they are marginalized through disability, lack of care, and poverty. The major issues expounded by the author in relation to rights are infant and child survival, early child development, street and working children, children in conflict with law, children with disabilities, child trafficking and child sexual abuse. The author goes further to delve into the causes, among which are high population, poverty, migration, illiteracy, poor legislation and deep-rooted social norms and behaviour. The book presents the existing policy and legal framework in India for each of these issues. The broad purpose of the book is to comprehensively discuss the roadblocks that the marginalized child in India faces, to understand the causes of these roadblocks and to evaluate government and civil society action for children in India.

This in-depth text goes beyond the rhetoric of the debate on children’s rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in particular, to provide a detailed examination of the impact that U.S. ratification of the Convention would have on U.S. law. The chapters have been written by leading children’s advocates and scholars with a general audience in mind, as the authors believe that it is important for all Americans to become informed about the Convention and about children’s rights in general. With a greater understanding of the substance of the Convention and children’s rights, readers will be better positioned to determine what the real issues are, what is simply rhetoric without any basis in fact or law, and how they can address the real issues in an effective manner in order to provide a better world for all children.

This book addresses the issue of agency in relation to child marriage. In international campaigns against child marriage, there is a puzzle of agency: While international human rights institutions celebrate girls’ exercise of their agency not to marry, they do not recognize their agency to marry. Child marriage, usually defined as ‘any formal marriage or informal union where one or both of the parties are under 18 years of age’, is normally considered as forced – which is to say that it is assumed that are not capable of consenting to marriage. This book, however, re-examines this assumption, through a detailed socio-legal examination of child marriage in Indonesia. Eliciting the multiple competing frameworks according to which child marriage takes place, the book considers the complex reasons why children marry. Structural explanations such as lack of opportunities and oppressive social structures are important, but not exhaustive, explanations. Exploring the subjective reasons by listening to children’s perspectives, their stories show that many of them decide to marry for love, desire, to belong to the community, and for new opportunities and hopes. The book, then, demonstrates how the child marriage framework – and, indeed, the human rights framework in general – is constructed on too narrow a vision of human agency: One that cannot but fail to respect and promote the agency of all, regardless of gender, race, religion, and age. This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in the areas of children’s rights, legal anthropology, and socio-legal studies.